git-pull: could not detach HEAD for Unicode filenames

Question

I run this git pull command and it chokes on the Unicode file names

& git pull
From . 
  * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
    test-sample-files/MByte/CJK-UTF8-MultiByte/樣品套裝/サンプル.java
    test-sample-files/MByte/CJK-UTF8-MultiByte/樣品套裝/의 견본을 뽑다.java
    test-sample-files/MByte/japanese/これはサンプルのテストであり、できるだけ早く修正する必要があります.java
    test-sample-files/MByte/japanese/サンプル.java
    test-sample-files/MByte/korean/의 견본을 뽑다.java
Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.
Aborting
could not detach HEAD

However a git status reports the working directory clean

$ git status
# On branch dev/experimental
# Your branch and 'master' have diverged,
# and have 3 and 96 different commit(s) each, respectively.
#
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

no "git add", or "git reset" or "rm ...*" does resolve the situation. Any help is much appreciated.

P.S.: I'm running "git version 1.7.5.4" on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), which is the latest pre-build I could find for leopard.

Wow. Can you actually have a class named 의 견본을 뽑다? That's pretty cool. — Michael Mior, Apr 17 '12 at 22:17

CharlesB · Answer 1 · 2012-04-18T12:21:36.733

3

Your files are untracked in the current state of your working tree. That's why git add or git rm doesn't do anything.

Stash them with git stash save --untracked, they will be saved in a stash. After pull you can restore with git stash pop but you might have conflicts them since the pull will have checked theme out at a possible different content.

Since you're stuck with Git 1.7.5 stash doesn't know the --untracked option, so you can

move untracked files to a temp directory, and restore them:

 git ls-files --other --exclude-standard | xargs -t -I file  mv file untracked

Or add them with git add -u, and commit

edited Apr 18 '12 at 12:21

answered Apr 17 '12 at 22:23

CharlesB

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Thanks Charles, unfortunately mu version of git does not have the option of stash save --untracked. – Kaj Kandler Apr 18 '12 at 12:05
that's too bad, you can try to install 1.7.10 with [howebrew](http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/) – CharlesB Apr 18 '12 at 12:24

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

2

The cause for this is described in stack overflow already and a workaround to handle Mac OS X UTF-8 encoded file names with git! is described as well.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

Community

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answered Apr 18 '12 at 16:29

Kaj Kandler

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git-pull: could not detach HEAD for Unicode filenames

2 Answers2